Tim Blair
–,
Monday,
February,
04,
2013,(1:00pm)

CBS commentators quickly mentioned that there was no public safety risk during Superbowl XLVII’s big lights-out. That’s no small matter in New Orleans, where things can get a little bloody in the dark. The place is even stranger during a Superbowl week.

UPDATE. We’re coming up to 30 minutes of no play thanks to banks of lights shutting down. It’s the greenest Superbowl ever!

Tim Blair
–,
Monday,
February,
04,
2013,(12:17pm)

Good news: former Sydney Morning Herald senior political correspondent Margo Kingston is no longer retired. Great news: she’s still the same old Margo …

The Prime Minister has made a bold, perhaps revolutionary decision that has already flummoxed the MSM and will be fascinating to watch play out this election year.

She’s detached herself from the 24 hour news cycle.

Gillard’s apparently done this despite several press conferences in the past week. The woman is magical.

That’s why she looks grounded. Settled. Real. Her stridency has gone. She can even shed a tear in public, as she did today at her farewell press conference to two minister friends.

Just as well Gillard merely lost a couple of parliamentary pals. If the Attorney-General and the government’s Senate leader had quit, she might be in trouble.

I reckon she began moving into this new phase of her leadership after the public’s overwhelmingly positive response to her misogyny speech compared so starkly to the Press Gallery’s overwhelmingly negative one. Despite the powerful media forces determined to crush her, lots of Australians hadn’t heard their narrative, or at least hadn’t been smothered by it. They were frustrated too, and their sense of release hearing her speech released her too.

Released her from where?

In the two months I’ve been watching politics again I’ve seen her relax into the practical consequences of this moment of clarity. She has begun making public statements on twitter, cutting out the so-called messengers.

She began the year with her controversial captain’s pick, wore the yucky flak, and then made a huge captain’s call by completely freaking out the Press Gallery in her first public set piece. Election date set … She also chose that moment to begin wearing glasses in public.

Do they match the yucky flak?

They symbolise her psychological detachment and her physical shield from the lemming-like ADHD madness of a media in existential crisis.

I wear glasses for the same reason. Also to read.

After the Thomson arrest, she again traumatised the MSM by not rushing in to comment on or spin it. She’d been busy with Bundaberg flood victims, she said, and really, this was a matter for police. Which it is. So they reported she’d ‘deflected questions’ on Thomson …

Which she did.

She wore it, and she’ll keep wearing it.

Are we talking about the glasses or the yucky flak?

Did you notice at today’s press conference that she gritted her teeth and set her jaw as the usual inane questions lobbed from journos? Contempt and endurance.

The same qualities are needed to get through this column. By the way, these repeated press conferences … how do they square with someone who is detached from the 24 hour news cycle?

She’ll keep showing up to Press Gallery press conferences and take all the questions ...

She will because she wants to keep proving to Australians that she’s up for it. Unlike Abbott, whose speech to the Press Club was designed to make the media like him, she’s transcended that tawdry goal.

Absolutely. Margo is several steps past “like”. She hasn’t been this infatuated with a politician since her adoration of Mark Latham and Pauline Hanson.

Julia Gillard is going to do this year her way. Yes folks, she’s real and she’s free and she’s talking to us, not them. Weird.